So nice to see 3com come to the party years after Apple dropped the ball.
Not sure what all the fuss about Transmeta is when we've had ARM all along... oh yeah, x86 bugulation.:-)
ARM's a nice architecture. Low power consumption, decent performance, big- or little-endian modes (take your pick). Lots and lots of general purpose registers.
Now, if 3com can convince Apple to license the Newton OS... there'd be a real handheld computer once more.
I can dream, can't I?
Re:Cost for PPC Systems
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 1
Okay, you've got a point.
Most of the discussion here was about Macs running Linux, and you're just not going to see these exotic compilers in that environment.
Given the set of parameters that most of us are working with, egcs is the clear winner.
Maybe IBM will open-source the mighty xlc someday - I'm not going to hold my breath.
Sadly, no one is likely to accept your challenge. People are generally unwilling to back up their territorial behavior with facts.
As for the Slashdot demographic, there are probably lots and lots of teenagers, some of whom would be hard to identify as such, many of whom probably fit the stereotype you described quite nicely. I wouldn't be surprised if they represent the majority of Slashdot readers.
I'm reminded of buying a copy of MacAddict at the supermarket, to have it checked by a teenager who promptly launched into the "sucking wimpy Macs" tirade. Yawn.
Yep. Fact is, most people won't see a lot of difference between equivalently-clocked G3 and G4 machines, other factors being equal (Rage 128 video, 100 MHz bus). Most of the difference is in the vector units, and there's not much software that's been updated to take advantage of that feature.
If by GCC you mean gcc -> egcs, which is what everyone running on PowerPC uses, it's pretty good. IME, egcs is the best optimizing compiler for the PowerPC platform. It generates relatively fast, compact, mostly bug-free code, which is more than can be said for Apple's MrC, Metrowerks Codewarrior, or even Motorola's own compiler.
Original-flavor gcc generated such crappy code for all non-Intel architectures... that's one of the reasons for the egcs project.
It probably hasn't been "bummed to the max" the way the x86 code generators have, but dammit, why do we keep making cleaner architectures and faster chips if we're going to sit around spending all our time to trying to make compilers spit out hand-tuned machine code?:-) Seriously, there is less necessity for this kind of thing when you are no longer constrained by a CPU that has only a handful of registers and thieves' argot of an instruction set.
PPC Systems -- Apple and Non-Apple
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 1
Some possible reasons, aside from mobility, to use a PowerPC system for Linux:
1. The cool-looking case.:-)
2. You don't like x86. (People who have a problem with Intel, etc.)
3. You need to dual-boot with MacOS.
4. You're a conservationist (all of these systems consume less energy than their Intel counterparts). This becomes especially relevant as you engage in SMP.
For a while there, you could get non-Apple PowerPC boxen from LinuxPPC (http://www.linuxppc.com/). I don't know if they're still doing it.
If you're hardcore, get the plans for IBM's open PPC motherboard and roll your own.:-)
PPC systems are NOT significantly more costly than their Intel counterparts.
By the time you factor in the fancy case, motherboards with actual engineering (!) and the exotic (and in many ways superior) microprocessor, how exactly are you paying so much more for one of these machines? The iBook is the best example. The closest thing to it in terms of features and performance is a certain ThinkPad model, which costs several hundred US dollars *more*.
Of course, if you want to run Windows, you don't have much choice. But how many/.ers are going to admit to wanting to run Windows?;-)
You can run NetBSD or Linux on a Mac. Some poster above felt native Linux didn't run much faster than emulated Linux... I want some of whatever he's smoking. egcs produces the best-optimized code for the PPC architecture (as well as most others), and all of LinuxPPC is compiled with it (since origina-flavor gcc generates brain-damaged code for PPC). It's *really fast*. I know it's meaningless, but close to 500 Bogomips on my wimpy old upgraded-to-300 MHz-G3 box, with teeny 512K cache and slow 45 MHz bus.
I bought this machine in 1995, and have only spent a couple hundred bucks on upgrades to stay fairly current. Anyone playing Q3A on their 1995 PC? If so, let's hear from you.
mstone covered this nicely above, but here it is again:
./ers should not expect Apple to cast its crown jewels before swine. You might as well ask Intel to hand you a silver platter laden with all of its R&D, together with IP rights, to the Pentium and Celeron product lines. Right, they'd be happy to. All the business they've done since the 4004 was just for kicks, anyway. Who'd want to be the leading producer of microprocessors? Shame on them for protecting that franchise. Ad nauseam.
Certainly, everyone hopes they will pay attention and release this. Frankly, it wouldn't be tough to do, since they had to port it to MacOS X already.
However, I'd like to point out that Linux people aren't the only ones suffering from poor or absent support for various Web add-ons. *Java*, Flash and Shockwave on the Mac are incredibly buggy, to the point of being unusable. Plug-ins like Third Voice, same deal. We've been living with this stuff for years. In a way, it's nice to finally be a first-class platform for a high-demand technology.
I still insist that every Web technology should work on every platform, period. Guess that's why my web page is kinda boring.:-)
How nice that you've convinced yourself of this. I wonder how many other half-baked prophecies you've acquired from Jesse Berst and friends?
Seems clear that you never read the business page.
Apple is, quite possibly, in the most enviable position in the desktop market. And they have nowhere to go but up.
The implication that all Apple is doing is porting software is patently absurd. Apple is succeeding in making a user-friendly Unix, which a lot of really smart people have worked really hard to do for decades (and failed).
Enjoy your Linux on your AMD box. Give a call next time you need to run, I don't know, Illustrator, a real word processor, games, etc. etc. etc.
You're sure nostalgic for the golden age of hardware. Do you miss your Commodore 64?:-)
Commodity hardware has always sucked. Personally, I think Apple hardware still sucks a bit less than PC hardware.
An important point you seem to be missing is this: most people do not have the time, the inclination, or the wherewithal to do the considerable amount of research and self-education necessary to build an SMP box out of parts for less than $1000. Most people don't know what SMP is, and don't really care about it's already severely limited applications anyway. To really take advantage of that SMP box, you need to run a Unix... it doesn't take much awareness to understand that mainstream computer buyers simply don't care about this.
Yes, Apple uses cheaper components than they used to. That's how they brought their prices down. They are still a cut above most major PC vendors when it comes to integration and quality, not to mention that a lot of people are happy to pay $100 extra for the spiffy case. The iBook line, for instance, is really a much better deal in hardware-only terms than any of the Intel-based offerings. This is also pretty easy to see if you can get out of the "Apple is dead" mindset long enough to see it.
Other considerations:
If you want to run MacOS for some reason, Apple is clearly the only choice.
"Market share." A bogus measurement any way you slice it, but Apple is still the only major desktop hardware vendor whose market share is growing. If they suck much, why are they doing so well all of a sudden?
Or you could save yourself the effort and just get a Mitsubishi G150 if you only need PCS, or a Nokia 6100 series if you need analog too.
I have a G150 and it's a much better phone than the highly touted Nokia 2100 series, the Ericssons, and pretty much any other phone I've looked at. It has better reception than pretty much any PCS phone, and to me, that's the most important feature in a phone. The feature set isn't bad at all, but you can't play games or check your calendar on it like you can with the Nokia.:-) Which has terrible reception, by the way.
You are right, it's pretty open by now. You can use any recent Apple box with off-the-shelf PC components over PCI bus, USB, Firewire, and EIDE, provided you have a vendor driver or a suitable generic driver for the hardware you wish to use. I even have an older Mac with a generic Voodoo 2 card and an aftermarket cheapo PCI-USB card in it and it works fine with all my USB stuff.
People who are asking for the mobo design to be open might as well ask Asus or Tyan to give away all their trade secrets as well. Open source hardware just hasn't arrived yet, IBM's PPC mobo offering notwithstanding. It's nice for things to be open, but companies have to figure out how to make money some how. If there were no money in making computers, we wouldn't have an open source software scene at all.
How do you equate Apple's next OS release being a new port/distribution of BSD, with a tremendous amount of NeXT and Apple GUI development and integration factored in... with pure glitz? Isn't glitz what we're already getting from M$?
A pure hardware vendor? Have the rumors of MacOS X on Intel, Transmeta, and AMD possibly becoming a real product totally escaped you?
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it doesn't seem to have much basis in reality.
PPC specialists? It's another RedHat-knockoff, only it's a knockoff of LinuxPPC, which is a RedHat knockoff, ad nauseam.
As always, I applaud the LinuxPPC folks for their hard work on porting the kernel, but unless what you want in a distribution is last year's RedHat, their distro leaves a great deal to be desired.
Debian for PPC, sure, but it's not available in a stable release, you can't (officially) get a CD, and all the other problems one associates with Debian, such as packages that are 2^20 version increments from being current, thanks to the glacial QA cycle. FWIW, even the ultra-conservative BSD releases usually have newer packages than Debian-stable at any given point in time. It's amazing how good Debian is, given how chaotic the development cycle is beneath the veneer of seriousness ("Outer Space, powered by Debian").
I recently refurbished an old 486 box for a friend. In the interest of experimentation, I tried all the major Linux distros as well as FreeBSD on it before settling on the final choice. Of all the Linux distributions, I found Slackware was by far the easiest to get running and configured and it was also, interestingly enough, by far the best-performing Linux on the old 486. I eventually decided to but BSD on it, but only because BSD included some packages I needed that Slackware didn't have on the CD.
Slackware is my favorite Linux. How about a port to PowerPC?;-)
1999 was just as easy to install as any version of RedHat for Alpha or Intel.
Yes, it's a shame that the PowerPC port is a second class citizen. It's even more of a shame that the only released distributions for PowerPC are RedHat derivatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear.
:-)
So nice to see 3com come to the party years after Apple dropped the ball.
Not sure what all the fuss about Transmeta is when we've had ARM all along... oh yeah, x86 bugulation.
ARM's a nice architecture. Low power consumption, decent performance, big- or little-endian modes (take your pick). Lots and lots of general purpose registers.
Now, if 3com can convince Apple to license the Newton OS... there'd be a real handheld computer once more.
I can dream, can't I?
Okay, you've got a point.
Most of the discussion here was about Macs running Linux, and you're just not going to see these exotic compilers in that environment.
Given the set of parameters that most of us are working with, egcs is the clear winner.
Maybe IBM will open-source the mighty xlc someday - I'm not going to hold my breath.
Sadly, no one is likely to accept your challenge. People are generally unwilling to back up their territorial behavior with facts.
As for the Slashdot demographic, there are probably lots and lots of teenagers, some of whom would be hard to identify as such, many of whom probably fit the stereotype you described quite nicely. I wouldn't be surprised if they represent the majority of Slashdot readers.
I'm reminded of buying a copy of MacAddict at the supermarket, to have it checked by a teenager who promptly launched into the "sucking wimpy Macs" tirade. Yawn.
Yep. Fact is, most people won't see a lot of difference between equivalently-clocked G3 and G4 machines, other factors being equal (Rage 128 video, 100 MHz bus). Most of the difference is in the vector units, and there's not much software that's been updated to take advantage of that feature.
Hehe. Yes, Rage 128 is so "crappy" compared to the stuff that ships standard with most commodity PCs...
'Sides, you can add your own video. Voodoo 4/5 should please you if you just have to play Q3A.
If by GCC you mean gcc -> egcs, which is what everyone running on PowerPC uses, it's pretty good. IME, egcs is the best optimizing compiler for the PowerPC platform. It generates relatively fast, compact, mostly bug-free code, which is more than can be said for Apple's MrC, Metrowerks Codewarrior, or even Motorola's own compiler.
:-) Seriously, there is less necessity for this kind of thing when you are no longer constrained by a CPU that has only a handful of registers and thieves' argot of an instruction set.
Original-flavor gcc generated such crappy code for all non-Intel architectures... that's one of the reasons for the egcs project.
It probably hasn't been "bummed to the max" the way the x86 code generators have, but dammit, why do we keep making cleaner architectures and faster chips if we're going to sit around spending all our time to trying to make compilers spit out hand-tuned machine code?
Some possible reasons, aside from mobility, to use a PowerPC system for Linux:
:-)
:-)
1. The cool-looking case.
2. You don't like x86. (People who have a problem with Intel, etc.)
3. You need to dual-boot with MacOS.
4. You're a conservationist (all of these systems consume less energy than their Intel counterparts). This becomes especially relevant as you engage in SMP.
For a while there, you could get non-Apple PowerPC boxen from LinuxPPC (http://www.linuxppc.com/). I don't know if they're still doing it.
If you're hardcore, get the plans for IBM's open PPC motherboard and roll your own.
It's been said many times here. Here we go again:
/.ers are going to admit to wanting to run Windows? ;-)
PPC systems are NOT significantly more costly than their Intel counterparts.
By the time you factor in the fancy case, motherboards with actual engineering (!) and the exotic (and in many ways superior) microprocessor, how exactly are you paying so much more for one of these machines? The iBook is the best example. The closest thing to it in terms of features and performance is a certain ThinkPad model, which costs several hundred US dollars *more*.
Of course, if you want to run Windows, you don't have much choice. But how many
You can run NetBSD or Linux on a Mac. Some poster above felt native Linux didn't run much faster than emulated Linux... I want some of whatever he's smoking. egcs produces the best-optimized code for the PPC architecture (as well as most others), and all of LinuxPPC is compiled with it (since origina-flavor gcc generates brain-damaged code for PPC). It's *really fast*. I know it's meaningless, but close to 500 Bogomips on my wimpy old upgraded-to-300 MHz-G3 box, with teeny 512K cache and slow 45 MHz bus.
I bought this machine in 1995, and have only spent a couple hundred bucks on upgrades to stay fairly current. Anyone playing Q3A on their 1995 PC? If so, let's hear from you.
"Insightful?" Bah.
mstone covered this nicely above, but here it is again:
./ers should not expect Apple to cast its crown jewels before swine. You might as well ask Intel to hand you a silver platter laden with all of its R&D, together with IP rights, to the Pentium and Celeron product lines. Right, they'd be happy to. All the business they've done since the 4004 was just for kicks, anyway. Who'd want to be the leading producer of microprocessors? Shame on them for protecting that franchise. Ad nauseam.
The only client that works for Talk City on MacOS is their propietary Java client.
Fact-checking is lots of fun. Let's try it some time.
Certainly, everyone hopes they will pay attention and release this. Frankly, it wouldn't be tough to do, since they had to port it to MacOS X already.
:-)
However, I'd like to point out that Linux people aren't the only ones suffering from poor or absent support for various Web add-ons. *Java*, Flash and Shockwave on the Mac are incredibly buggy, to the point of being unusable. Plug-ins like Third Voice, same deal. We've been living with this stuff for years. In a way, it's nice to finally be a first-class platform for a high-demand technology.
I still insist that every Web technology should work on every platform, period. Guess that's why my web page is kinda boring.
Let's all take this opportunity to pledge fealty to the One True Software License, the Holiest of Holies, the Gee Pee Ell!
Surely the omnipotent and omniscient Stallman will grant our wishes to see the demise of the infidels, who hold other license above the Gee Pee Ell!
Hey, those must be some good drugs.
"I'll have what he's having."
How nice that you've convinced yourself of this. I wonder how many other half-baked prophecies you've acquired from Jesse Berst and friends?
Seems clear that you never read the business page.
Apple is, quite possibly, in the most enviable position in the desktop market. And they have nowhere to go but up.
The implication that all Apple is doing is porting software is patently absurd. Apple is succeeding in making a user-friendly Unix, which a lot of really smart people have worked really hard to do for decades (and failed).
Enjoy your Linux on your AMD box. Give a call next time you need to run, I don't know, Illustrator, a real word processor, games, etc. etc. etc.
You're sure nostalgic for the golden age of hardware. Do you miss your Commodore 64? :-)
Commodity hardware has always sucked. Personally, I think Apple hardware still sucks a bit less than PC hardware.
An important point you seem to be missing is this: most people do not have the time, the inclination, or the wherewithal to do the considerable amount of research and self-education necessary to build an SMP box out of parts for less than $1000. Most people don't know what SMP is, and don't really care about it's already severely limited applications anyway. To really take advantage of that SMP box, you need to run a Unix... it doesn't take much awareness to understand that mainstream computer buyers simply don't care about this.
Yes, Apple uses cheaper components than they used to. That's how they brought their prices down. They are still a cut above most major PC vendors when it comes to integration and quality, not to mention that a lot of people are happy to pay $100 extra for the spiffy case. The iBook line, for instance, is really a much better deal in hardware-only terms than any of the Intel-based offerings. This is also pretty easy to see if you can get out of the "Apple is dead" mindset long enough to see it.
Other considerations:
If you want to run MacOS for some reason, Apple is clearly the only choice.
"Market share." A bogus measurement any way you slice it, but Apple is still the only major desktop hardware vendor whose market share is growing. If they suck much, why are they doing so well all of a sudden?
Of course, there are epinions and deja .coms.
:-) Which has terrible reception, by the way.
Or you could save yourself the effort and just get a Mitsubishi G150 if you only need PCS, or a Nokia 6100 series if you need analog too.
I have a G150 and it's a much better phone than the highly touted Nokia 2100 series, the Ericssons, and pretty much any other phone I've looked at. It has better reception than pretty much any PCS phone, and to me, that's the most important feature in a phone. The feature set isn't bad at all, but you can't play games or check your calendar on it like you can with the Nokia.
Good luck with your search.
By some miracle, your post didn't get moderated down into the netherworld of negative scores.
How rare it is to read someone tell it like it is on Slashdot. Thank you.
You are right, it's pretty open by now. You can use any recent Apple box with off-the-shelf PC components over PCI bus, USB, Firewire, and EIDE, provided you have a vendor driver or a suitable generic driver for the hardware you wish to use. I even have an older Mac with a generic Voodoo 2 card and an aftermarket cheapo PCI-USB card in it and it works fine with all my USB stuff.
People who are asking for the mobo design to be open might as well ask Asus or Tyan to give away all their trade secrets as well. Open source hardware just hasn't arrived yet, IBM's PPC mobo offering notwithstanding. It's nice for things to be open, but companies have to figure out how to make money some how. If there were no money in making computers, we wouldn't have an open source software scene at all.
?!?
How do you equate Apple's next OS release being a new port/distribution of BSD, with a tremendous amount of NeXT and Apple GUI development and integration factored in... with pure glitz? Isn't glitz what we're already getting from M$?
A pure hardware vendor? Have the rumors of MacOS X on Intel, Transmeta, and AMD possibly becoming a real product totally escaped you?
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it doesn't seem to have much basis in reality.
PPC specialists? It's another RedHat-knockoff, only it's a knockoff of LinuxPPC, which is a RedHat knockoff, ad nauseam.
As always, I applaud the LinuxPPC folks for their hard work on porting the kernel, but unless what you want in a distribution is last year's RedHat, their distro leaves a great deal to be desired.
Debian for PPC, sure, but it's not available in a stable release, you can't (officially) get a CD, and all the other problems one associates with Debian, such as packages that are 2^20 version increments from being current, thanks to the glacial QA cycle. FWIW, even the ultra-conservative BSD releases usually have newer packages than Debian-stable at any given point in time. It's amazing how good Debian is, given how chaotic the development cycle is beneath the veneer of seriousness ("Outer Space, powered by Debian").
The packaging system may not be quite as good as that of BSD, but it's quite a lot better than RPM. :-)
Absolutely, if Linux is what you want to run.
;-)
I recently refurbished an old 486 box for a friend. In the interest of experimentation, I tried all the major Linux distros as well as FreeBSD on it before settling on the final choice. Of all the Linux distributions, I found Slackware was by far the easiest to get running and configured and it was also, interestingly enough, by far the best-performing Linux on the old 486. I eventually decided to but BSD on it, but only because BSD included some packages I needed that Slackware didn't have on the CD.
Slackware is my favorite Linux. How about a port to PowerPC?
Wasn't there recently a big flap about people tweaking Quake source code to build cheats into the client?
Or was that a different version?
Anyway, some Quake has source code available. From there it's simply a matter of porting.
If you want NetBSD in the first place, you probably couldn't care less whether you can have MacOS on the same drive or not anyway.
1999 was just as easy to install as any version of RedHat for Alpha or Intel.
Yes, it's a shame that the PowerPC port is a second class citizen. It's even more of a shame that the only released distributions for PowerPC are RedHat derivatives.